It’s the best time to be a nerd. It’s like my seven-year-old self put on my red orange puffy vest and traveled to a time when there are a 100 hours of superheros on a big screen, new visits are being made to the Star Wars galaxy, the Avengers have been assembled then snapped out of existence. Again, it’s an unbelievable time to be a nerd.
Yet a 3 second visit to Twitter would make you think we’re all living in a pocket dimension ruled by an alien race with goatees who force us to live of the meager scraps of King of Queens reruns. Some nerds are just darned angry.
We have nerdy things we never could have dreamed of, yet you’d think that our evil goateed overlords have shredded our comics, sabotaged all our RPG books, and stolen our Netflix password. Everything is awesome, yet many nerds are still unhappy, and taking every opportunity to complain and deconstruct the awesomeness.
I call it the griposecond, and it’s the impossibly short amount of time between a new genre gift is bestowed upon us and the time it takes for us nerds to start to gripe about it. The griposecond is an impossibly small unit of time, smaller even than the nanosecond, the yoctosecond, and the nerdosecond.
Seriously, I assure you that somewhere out there in the world of the Internet is someone struggling to think of the pettiest possible complaint. To be clear, we should not turn off our critical minds, just mindlessly consuming whatever is thrown at us. But I think we can all agree that a lot of nerds have simply gotten into the habit of complaining first, enjoying second.
Nerds on Earth is an Enthusiast Website
Nerds on Earth is an enthusiast website. Despite the rantings of Twitter, we’re not going to give a Marvel movie a review of 3.1 out of 10 unless it featured a cameo from Jar Jar Binks and two Kardashian sisters. The way I figure it, my 7-year-old self could never have imagined a Thor movie with the metal Walt Simonson visuals of Thor: Ragnarok to flash in front of me on a big screen. The fact that it would feature Jeff Goldblum to boot warrants a floor of at least a 7.0, and depending upon the use of Led Zeppelin music, it only goes UP from there.
So we try to limit our hot takes and try not to let the hot takes of others get too under our skin. And we don’t get too grandiose about our opinions most of the time. Because, um, actually, we write about nerdy stuff, after all. Ain’t nobody getting a PhD in nerd culture here.
It’s all about simple pleasures. Everyone has them. For some, it’s wishing the Patriots to lose. For others, it is stopping the gas pump on a round dollar amount. For us, it’s telling people about the nerdy things we love. So why gripe? Pleasure yourself. (That came out wrong. I’m really embarrassed by that sentence, dear readers. I’m also quite pleased with myself.)
Does all Nerd Content Get a Free Pass?
Does that mean that Nerds on Earth is never critical or highlight things we don’t like? Not at all! We still obviously point out things we don’t like and even our most complimentary reviews might be laced with sarcasm and snark. Sure, we’re enthusiastic, but we’re not uncritical. With that in mind, did you see Iron Fist? Woof. That was NOT Marvel on Netflix’s best work.
But the simple fact is this: We WANT to LIKE this stuff. We’re nerds and we’re thrilled about the simple existence of the 600 new board games released at GenCon, so our first instinct is to enjoy the heck out of them.
The old journalism adage is “if it bleeds, it leads,” meaning, of course, that a negatively written post or highlighting a piece of bad news will draw more attention, because humans. And we see this all the time on the Internet. As nerdy interlocutors have followed this line of thinking it has brought us to a place where us nerds can eat our own young, picking at the smallest of small nits.
You know what? The physics of Guardians of the Galaxy didn’t make a lick of sense but there was a Raccoon in space, which is awesome. And sometimes being awesome is simply enough.
And if it just takes you a hot second to start to gripe? Well, what are you gonna do, call the nerd police on us? Bad news, Buck-o, we are the nerd police and we’re letting ourselves off with a warning.
Charlotte Armstrong explained that a nerd is “just someone who is really passionate about something.” I think you could substitute the word enthusiastic for passionate, so yes, we’re an enthusiast site. We’ll probably round up on our reviews and will lead with the things we loved about a movie, and not first look for things to deconstruct.
It’s an unbelievable time to be a nerd. I say we should find pleasure in that.
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